Love and Scandal, page 28
“Well, pardon me! I did not know I was interfering with—”
He stopped her again with another kiss. This one was not as deep, but was full of passion and sweetness. He released her mouth and gazed into her eyes.
“Will you always keep me from arguing with you this way?” she murmured.
“If you insist on arguing, yes, I will.”
“Well, I call that unfair and taking base advantage of my weakness.”
Another kiss. Then he moved down to her neck and throat, bathing her in warm wet kisses and nipping at her earlobe.
“I must protest!” she said, gulping and clinging to his broad shoulders.
And yet another kiss, accompanied by the movement of skillful hands that cradled her bottom and lifted her against him.
“Oh, my! Yes, I well remember… That is, Jamie, shall we go somewhere? I don’t know where… Back…back to your cottage, perhaps?”
“Collette,” he groaned, at last. “Please stop talking.”
“Why?”
“Because if you don’t, I can’t very well propose marriage, can I?”
She pushed away from him and glared at him suspiciously, placing her fists on her hips. “Why do I think you are making fun of me? I make no claim to understand sophisticated humor, sir.”
His dark eyes glowed and his expression became serious. “I’m not making fun. I’m asking you to marry me, and for a rake that is the most serious thing of all. We never even joke of that, you know. But every rake finds his match eventually, or they move from rakedom to lechery, and that is not a pretty journey. Save me from it.”
“I…I…I think the term rake is becoming an anachronism in this day and age,” Collette sputtered. “In my aunt’s time it was different, but…”
He pulled her into his arms and kissed her quiet. “Collette, I mean what I say. Save me from myself. Marry me?”
“Why?” she blurted out.
“Why? You exasperating little harridan, why do you think?”
“I have no idea.”
“Because I love you.”
Her heart thumped. “Do you? Do you really love me?” She frowned and pulled away from him. “I…I cannot think when you hold me like that,” she muttered, moving away and folding her hands in front of her.
“Good,” he said, moving toward her again. “I’m not sure I want you to think, for you might realize you can do much better than my poor inadequate self. Perhaps it is best for me if I exert what poor influence I have.”
She escaped his clutches and put the round table that dominated one end of the room between them, panting from exertion or some less worthy reason. “No! I need to think. Do you really want to marry me?”
“Yes!”
“And do you really…” Her voice faltered. “Do you really love me, Jamie?”
“I do not say what I don’t mean. I’ve never said that to any other woman, Collette, never, on my honor.” His voice was low and trembled with emotion.
“I believe you,” she said, feeling an absurd spurt of happiness. That he could love her! That he could want to marry her! But there were considerations to think about in such an endeavor. She had just begun to experience a freedom of spirit she had never known she could have, and marriage would mean he was her master in a legal sense, even if she did not recognize any moral authority over her. “I love you too. I have been sitting here thinking that tonight.”
“Then you will marry me!”
“Not so fast,” she said, her steady gaze keeping him from advancing around the table to take her in his arms. She clutched the back of a wooden chair and stared at him. “What kind of husband will you be, Charles Stonehampton Jameson?”
“The very best,” he said indignantly. “I am generous, I think, and when I am with one woman I am faithful to her, with one or two youthful departures from that rule, and…”
“No, no, no, that is not what I am talking about. You will be faithful to me because…because no other woman will ever love you like I can. I’m confident of that. But…but the church, the law, even society will say you are my master. How will you use that power?” She gazed at him steadily, searchingly.
And then he knew, finally, what she feared. For the first time he thought about what it meant to be a woman, with all the intelligence and spirit and soul of a man, but only a quarter of the rights, if even that. “I will surrender it to you,” he said quietly, standing straight and not pursuing her. “I vow I will never interfere with your autonomy, Collette. I love you, but I respect you, too.”
“You will not try to make me stay away from George and Marian?”
“I will bring you to visit them myself, and learn to love them if you want me to.”
“You will not dictate what I may do or whom I might see? You will not try to lay down the law to me? I won’t stand it, and I mean that. I will leave you if you ever attempt to control me like Herbert does poor Henny.”
He shook his head. Herbert? Henny? Who the devil were they? “I would not dare deny anything to a woman with the power of the pen. You could rip me to shreds with words,” he said.
She sighed with a dreamy smile on her face. “Then perhaps…” She stopped before finishing and frowned.
His patience was wearing ragged, and he groaned. “Do you mean to keep me dangling forever?” He slumped into a chair and put his head down in his arms on the table.
“No, but…” She walked slowly toward him around the table, trailing her fingers across the polished surface. He straightened again, but she avoided his eyes. “I think there is something I should tell you. It may make all the difference to you…and to your intentions.”
“What? Do you already have a husband tucked away in Kent somewhere?”
“Of course not, but…” She stood before him, looking down into his eyes, her green gaze burning bright in the dim lamplight. She was afraid, so afraid, that this would change everything. Having just learned what love could be she was loath to lose it so quickly. “I am a country woman. I have enjoyed my stay in London—well, parts of my stay—but I love the country and I will want to live there. That would be a problem.”
“Why?”
“Because you belong in the city, in London. You wouldn’t want to live in the country. Would you?”
Jameson stood, put his arms around her and smiled down into her serious eyes. “My love, I was raised in the country, you know. I live in the city because as a bachelor it made sense, and yes, I do love London, for all of its faults. But if we marry, and we are to have children…” She blushed and turned her face away, but he put one finger under her chin and turned her back to face him, tilting her chin up so they gazed into each other’s eyes again. “If we marry and have children, I think I would like to raise them in the country. I found myself entranced with the Kentish countryside. I would like to buy a house there… Perhaps near your aunt? And we could spend a part of the year in London, going to shows, the opera, art showings.”
“Oh, Jamie, would you? Could we?”
“Of course. We can live anywhere you like, go anywhere you like. We can travel, do whatever we want!”
“And you will not object to my scribbling? For I won’t give it up,” Collette warned, still afraid to believe. “Not even if we have babies.”
“I wouldn’t dream of making you give it up, even if I could. I love you, Collette, and that means I love everything about you, including your writing.”
“I already have my next novel in mind,” she said dreamily, relaxing in his arms and laying her head on his shoulder. “It is going to be about Susan, the girl from Last Days, and I have learned so much about love and men and women, and I can…”
He stopped her with a swift kiss. Now was not the time to tell her about his own plans to become a publisher and his hope to work with her in a partnership. Time enough for that when he had secured her promise to marry him. “Soon. You will marry me, won’t you?” She nodded against his shoulder. “Then I will gladly sit by your side and trim your nibs for you after we are wed, but I shall claim, I think…” He gazed down at her consideringly. “Three weeks for a honeymoon. Three weeks. And then you can write all you want. In the daytime at least. At night…”
“At night,” she echoed, as she stood on the tips of her toes and wound her arms around his neck, kissing him feverishly. “Every night,” she gasped. “And maybe in the morning, too!”
Epilogue
Proctor whistled as he entered the offices of Wilson’s Gazette. He approached his desk, one of the benefits of his new, more stable position as their most popular writer. His exclusive interview with the newly revealed Colin Jenkins had raised circulation of the old rag to heights never before reached, and he certainly was the fair-haired boy around here. Old Wilson had even given him the go-ahead for a series of articles on the terrible conditions of the stews and rookeries, London’s filthiest and worst neighborhoods. He was going to uncover who the landlords were who profited from such abysmal human misery.
He was no do-gooder, but he remembered what it was like, and he would never let go of the anger he held inside of him until he did what he could.
Proctor threw himself into his creaking, battered chair. The one small job he had demanded they allow him to do was write up the wedding notice of Miss Collette Jardiniere and Mr. Charles Stonehampton Jameson. He wrote the copy, reflecting that once he had come to know the young lady he had been heartily ashamed of destroying her reputation as he had. She had spoken to him as “one writer to another”, and it had made him take a second look at what he really wanted from this job. Did he want to be remembered as the chap what dug up dirt? What he had said about her was cruel, and he had done what he could to make up for it. As a result, he had sworn off writing rumor and innuendo. It was beneath him, or at least it was beneath the man he wanted to become. Old habits would be hard to break; it wouldn’t be easy, but nothing in his life had ever been easy. And so he would try. Only the truth from now on.
“Here! Copy boy,” he said with a devilish grin as he held the sheet up and waved it around.
The new fellow in the office took it and grimaced, the poor light in the grimy office glinting off his glasses.
“There, there, Stuyvesent. Don’t look so unhappy all the time! You musta figured out why Mr. Bellringer had to let you go,” Proctor said, chuckling as he gazed up at the publisher’s former assistant.
Stuyvesent glared at him. “That old bastard! He wanted Miss Jardiniere to leave London, and I said I could fix it so she did! He didn’t give a damn how I did it until we got caught out.”
“By feeding me lies,” Proctor said, his voice hardening. “You led me to believe all kinds of rot.”
“As if you cared,” Stuyvesent sneered. “You wrote that bilge all the time. Don’t go all pure on me now. All I wanted was Bellringer to publish my novel. Lot better than that claptrap he publishes now!”
“His best writer left, thanks to your… What did he call it? ‘Evil machinations’, I think you told me?”
And indeed, Colin Jenkins had left Rosewood Publishing. That was one of the things that had given him most pleasure to write in his profile of Miss Collette Jardiniere. She would now be published by her husband’s new company, it was said. She was off on her honeymoon in France that very day, but would be retiring to the country to write on her return, she had told Proctor in her second exclusive interview with him.
Stuyvesent took the copy and set off for the printing room without another word. Ah, well, couldn’t blame the poor bugger for being angry. He had fallen indeed from being a publisher’s assistant to being a copy boy at the Gazette, but no other publishing company in the city would touch him after it was widely spread around, by a suddenly innocent Mr. Bellringer, exactly who had spread the rumors about Miss Jardiniere.
Let the fellow learn a bit about life and work his way up, like Proctor had, he thought. He bent his head over a fresh sheet of paper and started his story on the neighborhood, if such it could be called, where he had grown up. He had read Mr. Dickens’s books, all about the poor sections of the city. Now there was a writer who understood a little of life, even if his books were damnably thick and hard to make his way through at times.
At the moment when Proctor was bending to his article, relishing writing the truth in a way he had never written it before, the new Mrs. Charles Jameson was dreamily staring over the railing of a boat bound for France as she and her new husband departed for their honeymoon after spending their wedding night at one of London’s finest hotels. Jamie stood behind her with his arms around her waist, holding her against his warm body as the chill wind tugged at her bonnet and spirals of auburn hair. The setting was bleak; the channel was choppy, white-capped waves crashing against the bow of the ferry from Dover to Calais.
But Jameson’s mood was sunny. “Happy?” he murmured in her ear, as well as he could around the confines of the bonnet.
“Yes,” she whispered back, the breeze taking her one word and lifting it to the heavens. There was no adequate way to tell him just how happy, so she would just have to show him again that night. Maybe more than once. She leaned back against him and anticipated the night.
He had shown her how perfect the union of man and woman could be, how sweet the sensation of skin on skin and how delectable the invasion of her body by his. Susan glowed with the knowledge that this was hers for a lifetime, and knew all her tomorrows would be rich and sweet.
The End
About the Author
Donna Lea Simpson, nationally bestselling author of historical and paranormal romances and mysteries, loves to write and read more than anything else. Becoming a published author was her dream from the age of twelve, and she feels fortunate that she achieved that goal. She can get lost in historical research, is fascinated by unusual tidbits of knowledge and is enthralled by the romance of history. History is about people, after all, and Donna loves to create characters who are immersed in, and react realistically to, the times in which they live.
But after working—and when not reading a mystery or historical novel—Donna likes to cook, sing karaoke, drink wine on the patio in the summer or chat with a good friend while drinking tea. She’s fond of cats and crafts, is a dedicated homebody and feels fortunate to be surrounded by wonderful family and faithful friends.
Donna loves a little mystery in her romance, and romance in her mystery!
For more information and to see Donna’s publishing history, visit her at www.donnaleasimpson.com.
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ISBN: 978-1-4268-9020-8
Copyright © 2010 by Donna Lea Simpson
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Table of Contents
Letter to Reader
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
About the Author
Donna Lea Simpson, Love and Scandal
